The Art of Varnishing: Wooden Boat Building Tips - Petrel Play SG - E29

Hey, welcome back to The Guillemot Kayaks Workshop. I'm Nick Schade. If you've been watching this series, we've been building the stitch and glue Petrel Play a kit sea kayak from Chesapeake Light Craft. Bill's been helping me out with this build, but he's not here for this episode. I filmed this about a month ago or over a month ago now. So in this episode, I'm doing the final finished coat of varnish on the whole boat. Let's get right to it.

So I was up at Wooden Boat School teaching fine strip plank boat building, and then I was teaching an on-the-water kayaking class, advanced sea kayaking. Now I'm back. At the end of this week is a wooden boat show. I would like to be able to show this boat at the boat show and we're very close. Bill's not here, so I'm just going to go ahead and do the final work to get this boat done. At this point, I've put four coats of varnish on here. I'm not sure if this is all one video or if this will be a start of a new video or whatever, but we'll figure that out in due course.

I would like to sand out this varnish. The varnish I used is a fast-drying varnish that allows you to put on multiple coats without sanding between coats. So I got four coats on here, and now I would like to do one more sanding before putting on the final finish coat. I'll use a little bit better protecting varnish for the final coat, but I would like to get these four coats all leveled out and smooth so the final coat really looks sharp.

Since I'm running out of time, I'm not going to hand sand it. I'm going to go ahead and use a power sander. I've got 320 grit sandpaper on the sander here, and I'm just going to go over the whole thing and level that out. So sort of the same process we were doing before with the level sanding of the epoxy, we're doing the same thing here. I've got some drips and sags that I want to level out, and this process with a fairly stiff backer pad on here will level those out and create a good prepped surface for the final coat of varnish. So I'll just get right to it.

So I have a few drips here, just from me being a little bit sloppy. They start to show up a little bit more when you sand. Previously, I've talked about using a rasp to get rid of drips on the epoxy. Well, this is sort of a rasp that's specifically intended for leveling the surface of paint. It's for doing auto body work. It's just a very fine file, and I can take that and go over that drip and get it leveled down to the surface a little bit more.

So again, I'm trying to level out this surface so when I put the next final coat of varnish on, I've got a really level surface here and that next coat of varnish will level out perfectly. One thing to know here is I applied these four coats of varnish that are on here about three or four weeks ago, so it's had a long time to harden, and the sanding works better when that varnish is really good and hard.

So like when we were sanding the epoxy, I'm just sanding the flat surfaces with the power tool or with the most aggressive thing, and then we'll come back and get the keel and the chines with more careful hand sanding. It's very easy to burn through these sharp corners if you lean into it too much with the sander, so I'm just going to hook up a hand sander with some fine grit sandpaper on that and knock down those forms.

All right, that's the bottom all sanded out, and I'll go on to the top. One thing you may ask at this point is you'll notice I'm dry sanding. So I'm using the power sander with just the bag hooked up, as opposed to wet sand. I will sometimes wet sand the deck or I will sometimes wet sand the varnish, but what wet sanding does is the water washes away the sanding crud.

This varnish, like I just mentioned, it's been curing for better part of a month already, so it's really quite hard. It sands to nice fine powder, and my vacuum sucks it right up. If I were sanding this shortly after applying the varnish, the varnish might still be a little bit gummy, which is going to tend to clog up the sandpaper, and the dust collection doesn't do as good a job cleaning it up. So that's a prime time to go ahead and try wet sanding. It might still gum stuff up a bit, but it does a better job of getting rid of the sanding crud.

Bottom line, I wet sand when I've got fresh finish, and I dry sand when it's good hard and makes good fine easy-to-remove dust. So I'm going to go ahead and work on this with the power sander on the big areas. I'll might come in with the hand sander on some of the sides here and some of the finer areas, but we'll just get right to it. Once again, I am replacing the sandpaper early and often. Good sharp sandpaper does a better job of this. It's faster and it levels more evenly than dull sandpaper. I'm trying to save some time, and I just feel my time's worth more than the cost of these sanding discs. I do keep the used ones, and if I have some hand sanding I want to do, they can come in handy.

I'm going to go directly into varnishing here. What I'm trying for with this varnish job is, the reason we're varnishing this boat is to protect the epoxy from ultraviolet. So just getting a bunch of coats of varnish on here is going to achieve that goal, whether or not you've got brush marks, drips, etc. So I'm taking it a little bit beyond that, trying to get a nice level clean coat of varnish. It's not going to be perfect. I can do better. It depends again on prep work.

For my initial coats here, again, I used a varnish that allows me to put multiple coats on a day without sanding in between coats. The downside of not sanding between coats is it builds up kind of an uneven surface with lots of brush marks, and all the sags start to accumulate. The reflections aren't going to be perfect off of here, but I think they'll be very good.

So the amount of time, just like the whole project, the amount of time you put into the finish work will affect the quality of the final finish. The more time, the better your chances of good results. But I'm not trying for perfect here; I'm just trying for good. So I've sanded to 320 here. I've now wiped, I vacuumed any remaining dust off, and I've wiped it down with essentially paint thinner to get any contaminants off. And now I will go directly into varnishing.

By the time I've got the varnish prepped out and filtered, this solvent I have on here should have evaporated, and I should be ready to just apply finish directly. All the prior coats you've been working on, think of as practice for this final coat. You need to worry about maintaining a wet edge, so you want to move fairly quickly.

Here with this deck, there's sort of all these chines which create a sort of logical place in between areas of varnishing. So I'm going to try and take advantage of those, but you also need to be careful varnishing over an edge like this. If you drag a brush over a sharp edge like that, it's going to suck finish off your brush and very possibly make a sag. So I'm going to try and brush parallel to those feature lines when I'm in that area and trying not to drag the brush across those feature lines too much. So I'm going to start filtering out the varnish and get ready for the final coat.

The trickiest bit is around the combing, so I'm going to start there. I use a small brush for that just to get into the tight areas a little bit easier. Now I'll switch to the 2-inch brush. These are foam brushes made by Jensen's manufacturing. Now I'm going to start again working in small sections, approximately one foot at a time. Nice horizontal strokes to get it on there, vertical strokes to even it out, and then horizontal strokes again to tip it off. And then I'll switch to the other side so I can see what's going on over here. Get that done and then not dragging the brush over that feature line, going parallel to it. And we'll go down near to the recess hatch, recess course from either side of the feature line and switch sides.

Okay, that's the final coat of varnish on the deck. We will let this cure. I'm not sure if I'm going to go directly to the hull or if I'm going to work on installing the hatches and bulkheads. I can do that now that the final coat of varnish is on. The hatches will go in here, and I have not varnished the flat surface here where the hatch will glue down. So now that it's all varnished, I can get into that, and I don't need to worry about masking off the hatches.

So we just finished up the varnishing of the deck, but now I'm going to go directly to the varnishing of the hull. In between these sections, I actually did go ahead and do all the interior installation, the bulkheads and the seats and so forth. And so I decided to combine these two sections that happened on different days, several days apart, with something else happening in between, just because it makes sense to put all the varnishing together. And so through the wonders of editing, I'm putting the varnishing bits together. There will be another episode about the installation of the interior stuff coming up after this.

All right, now all the practice you put on in all those previous layers, you're using it now to get a nice smooth coat. So same drill: horizontal get it on the boat, vertical to even that out, and then tip it off going from dry into wet. Then switch sides, move down two sets of stitch holes. Don't brush across the chine and tip off. Here I don't want to get any down into the skegs. I'm not going to fill my brush above it.

One on each, one on one side then two on the other, two on the other, two on the other, switching every two sections. That way, maintain the wet edge right up here along the keel line. Not that it matters that much on the bottom of the boat - first time you land on a beach, any brush marks at that keel line are going to be obscured by scratches. So don't sweat it too much.

One thing to keep in mind with brushing here is the first pass here, this is laying varnish down. So I'm trying to get varnish on every spot of the boat. The next pass here is evening it out. So if there's not enough varnish, this should lay down a little bit more, and if there's too much varnish, it should suck up the excess. So we're not just worrying about putting down more varnish; we're taking some up. And this tipping off pass, that's almost exclusively picking up excess varnish.

So that's the varnishing of the petrel play. In the next episode, we'll install the seat, the foot pegs, the bulkheads, get the hatch rings installed. So if you're enjoying this series and want to see the finished product, that's coming up soon. We've just got a couple more episodes to go. If you're interested in building this boat, you can get a kit from Chesapeake Light Craft, or you can buy the plans from me. And I just released the plans as a digital download, and there should be a link up here for that. So until the next episode, thanks for watching and happy paddling.